by Jack Bunker
At the few lonely skyscrapers that separate Beverly Hills from the Sunset Strip, the T-bird makes the hairpin left at Doheny Road then an immediate right onto Sunset Hills Road. At the top of the hill she turns into a steep driveway, goes up the drive about fifty feet, then pulls into her carport, where I can’t see her anymore. I have no choice but to keep driving past so she doesn’t spot me.
I park down the street and sneak back on foot. She lives in a modern house near the bottom of a long drive that snakes a quarter mile up the hill before disappearing behind some trees. It’s as if Jane’s house is the guard booth for the mansion up above. A guard booth worth about three mil. The house is studded with terrazzo terraces overlooking the city.
No lights go on. No sounds of doors opening or closing. No footsteps. Something’s wrong. I take a step onto the driveway, and my footfall echoes between the retaining walls that flank it. I take off my shoes and climb the hill in my socks. I’m panting by the time I reach the carport. The T-bird purrs from the radiator fan and makes little clicks from the contractions of cooling steel.
I hear something and turn to see a faint glint coming at me from the shadows. Jane’s Rolex? Then I see the writing branded into the wood and feel like Paul Bunyan just split my forehead. As my world fades to black I wonder, What is it with porn babes and baseball bats?
THIRTY-TWO
Blinding light, blurry ceiling panels, pain. I’m alive.
My head feels like it’s being rhythmically whacked with a ball-peen hammer. I guess that’s an improvement over Paul Bunyan’s ax.
My thoughts are as slurred as a skid mark in mud. It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust to the glare of the overhead light, but when they do I see a guy in a sharkskin excuse for a suit that even I wouldn’t wear. Must be a cop. The suit is dog-shit brown to match his beady eyes. His black hair is slicked straight back from a widow’s peak so sharp that it looks fake, like someone painted an arrowhead on his scalp with high-gloss enamel. He looks familiar, but I can’t place him.
“Can you hear me, Brown?”
“No.” I giggle. Must be on painkillers.
The cop turns around and speaks to someone behind him. “You didn’t tell me he’s a comedian.”
Gloria steps into my blurry field of vision beside him.
“You’re lucky she swung for your head,” she says. “Anywhere else, she could have done some damage.”
“Just what I feel: lucky.” I giggle again. Painkillers, definitely. Whatever they’re pumping into my veins, I like it. I wonder what the pain would feel like without it. “How’d I get here?”
“She called 911 after she recognized you,” says the cheap suit.
“Vajayna?”
“Good remembering,” he says. “I take it you’re familiar with her work?”
“What makes you think that?”
“Maybe you’re a fan.”
The statement is pointedly accusatory. This guy is making my drugs wear off. “Who the hell is this guy?” I ask Gloria.
“Touchy, aren’t we?” he says. “Need more painkillers?”
“Will they make you go away?”
“His name’s John Mepham,” says Gloria. “Deputy DA.”
Now I remember. He was the guy whose name I couldn’t peg at Ginger’s memorial, standing with Dumphy.
“I hear you got big feet,” I say.
He ignores the remark. “You have anything you want to tell us that pertains to a homicide, Brown?”
“What’s this have to do with homicide?” I ask Gloria. “Case you haven’t noticed, I’m still alive.”
Gloria takes up the questioning. “Why were you trying to sneak up on this Jane Porter, or Vajayna, or whatever the fuck her name is?”
“I was tailing her. Researching a story. It’s part of my job.”
“Not very good at it, are you?” Mepham couldn’t resist.
I’m struggling to focus through the haze. “Is there some point to this?”
“Got a report to file, Nob,” says Gloria. “Just tell us what happened so we can get out of here.”
“I got assaulted with a bat. If I’m not mistaken, in Criminology 101 they call that ‘the victim.’” I try to raise my arms to make little air quotes with my fingers, but I’m hit with a pain that even the drugs can’t stop, so I let my inflection make the point.
“What were you doing there, jerkoff?” asks Mepham. Gloria lets a smile slip out, amused at his frustration.
In the movies, this is the moment when the journalist invokes the First Amendment and tells the DA to shove it. But, frankly, that would be a stupid thing to do. I’ve got no one to protect and no interest in jail time. On the other hand, it can’t hurt to make the officious little shit earn his salary, so I don’t say anything.
“She said you came to her office,” says Gloria, “and tried to bully her into letting you talk to Ginger.”
“Bully her?”
“Now you’re stalking her, and Ginger’s dead,” says Mepham. “That makes you a likely, you ask me.”
All of a sudden the psychotropic effects of the drugs are wearing off at about Mach ten.
“That makes you an asshole, you ask me,” I say. No more giggling.
“How ’bout you tell us why you killed Ginger, smart guy.”
“How ’bout I talk to my lawyer.”
Gloria pipes in, “How ’bout you jerkwads both whip out your dicks, and I’ll measure ’em.” That shuts us both up.
Gloria nods Mepham out the door. He isn’t happy about it, but he leaves.
“I talked to Jane,” she says. “She’s nervous about this whole situation. She doesn’t want this in the papers.”
“I’d be nervous, too, if I almost beheaded an unarmed, innocent guy.”
“What innocent guy? You made threats and got kicked out of her office. Then you stalked her. You took your shoes off to sneak up on her, for Christ’s sake.”
“So what is that? Assault with a deadly toe jam?”
She’s not amused. “How about criminal threatening, harassment, intimidation, stalking, and trespassing?”
I acknowledge the idiocy of my actions with my eyebrows. “What’d Jane tell the DA?”
“You know I couldn’t tell you that if she’d said anything, but she played the emotionally distraught damsel. Refused to give a statement until she had time to recover from the shock. What about you? You distraught, too?”
“I want to talk to Jane about it before I decide.”
Gloria laughs. “Sure, Nob. It’s common practice for us to get the victim and the stalker together so they can work out a deal before going to trial.”
“Get with the program, Gloria. It’s in everyone’s interest for Jane and me to agree that this whole thing was an unfortunate accident and no crime was committed. Nobody wants this to go to court. Jane doesn’t want her neighbors to find out she’s a porn queen. I don’t want to publicize my ineptitude. Neither one of us wants the legal fees or the pain in the ass. And whether the DA decides to prosecute her for assault or me for stalking, they’re going to have a piss-poor case without cooperating witnesses. So how do you suggest we play it?”
Nobody’s under arrest at the moment, so Gloria and I both know there’s no legal reason why I can’t have a conversation with Jane. But we also know that if Gloria facilitates a powwow, the DA’s going to use one of his seven-hundred-dollar Bruno Magli wingtips to give her a sphincter exam.
“You’re on drugs, Nob. You’re not thinking clearly. I’m telling you: do not talk to Jane.” Gloria pulls a small notebook out of her purse and leafs through it. “If you do, and this goes to trial, which Mepham is aching to do, by the way, it’ll look like you tried to intimidate the witness. You might as well just hand your balls to Mepham right now.” She finds what she’s looking for and copies it onto a napkin. “I am dead serious, you dumb shit.”
She reaches out to grab my dick through the sheets and gives it a conspiratorial squeeze. “Stay away from Jane,” she sa
ys, enunciating each word like a sentence unto itself. Then she walks out.
I take a look at the napkin. It’s Jane’s cell number.
THIRTY-THREE
I’m too drugged to read, and the only TV station that works is in the middle of a twelve-hour Bonanza marathon. I’m reduced to watching the activity in the hallway, wishing some nurse would ramp up the action by dropping a tray.
All the patients who walk by have to clasp their gowns about them to avoid flashing the staff. It boggles the mind that these opened-back rags with their confounding string belts have not been redesigned since they were invented for the amusement of the guards in some fourteenth-century French lunatic asylum.
The gown I’m wearing has a missing belt, presumably ripped off by a frustrated patient. The worn material sports tiny red snowflakes that look like chicken pox. I’m itching to get home.
Melody sweeps into the room looking every inch the pixie. “Sorry I’m late,” she says. “I had a hassle at the nurses’ station with your release paperwork. You’re not very popular with the staff around here.”
I shrug. It hurts my head. “Just get me the hell out of here.”
“They’re still working on the paperwork,” she says with a froth in her voice that implies it could take a year or two. “But I’ve got something to help you pass the time.”
She hands me a manila envelope, already opened. The return address is a spoiler. Lana Strain’s probate records have finally arrived from the county.
“I take it you read them already,” I say.
“Good guess. They’re pretty straightforward,” she says as she opens the cheap fiberboard closet and takes my clothes off a coat hanger. “Billy got half as community property, she left a pittance to her father and the rest to her daughters in two identical trusts.”
“Trusts?” I’m no lawyer, but I know enough to be confused. “I thought if you had a trust, you don’t have to go through probate.”
“You don’t. Unless someone contests the will.” She lays my clothes across my legs on the bed then starts to twist her torso back and forth almost all the way around.
“Cogswell.” He pops up yet again. All of a sudden the blended stench of cleaning fluids and body fluids threatens to unleash the contents of my stomach. I try breathing through my mouth, but I feel like I’m inhaling toxins.
“According to Cogswell’s deposition,” she says, “Lana wanted to have Billy deemed an unfit parent and make Nathaniel Strain the girls’ legal guardian, but she died before she could sign the papers.”
“That would have given Gramps a virtual license to skim.”
“The legal guardian can’t get to any money unless the executor releases it. So Nathaniel would have had a pretty hard time looting the estate without Cogswell’s cooperation.”
“As far as I know, they never even met before the reading of the will, so why would Cogswell contest the will?”
“Why don’t you ask him?” She’s joking, but I’m already thinking about doing just that. I wonder what he’d do if I just went to his house and rang the bell.
It’s dark by the time Melody gets me home. I take the steps slowly.
Once ensconced in my fake Eames, I pull the napkin out of my pocket to call Jane on the land line. She answers on the first ring. Must have her Bluetooth in.
“It’s Nob Brown. We need to talk.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because the police have their procedures, and if we don’t handle this right, someone’s going to get charged with something, and we’ll both wind up in court and in the headlines.”
She’s silent for a moment and when she speaks there’s a lot of mistrust in her voice. “And just how do you suggest we handle it?”
“That’s what we need to talk about.”
Another silence. Of all things to think about, I wonder what she’s wearing.
“I’d want my lawyer there,” she says.
“That’s up to you.”
“And we meet in my office.”
“That’s fine. But I’ll need more than two minutes this time.”
We set up a meet for the morning.
I go to bed early. I’m exhausted but I can’t sleep. I’m too hyped about the meeting. Jane Porter insisted that it be in her office, on her turf. I wonder why. I have to assume the place is bugged, whether it is or not. Considering her profession, it’s probably videoed.
What if I incriminate myself for some crime with nuances I don’t understand, like conspiracy to evade justice or intimidate a witness or something? A conspiracy charge can be more serious than the crime you’re accused of conspiring to cover up. Maybe I should bring a lawyer, too. I’m going to need someone to drive me over there anyway, since the doctor said I can’t drive for a few days. I call Jack Angel.
“What do you want now, Nob?” The magic of caller ID.
“Hi, Angel. You busy tomorrow morning?”
“Why would I be busy tomorrow morning? Do I seem like the kind of guy who works sixty-hour weeks as a partner in a major law firm, serves on two corporate boards, does two days of pro bono work every month, swims four workouts a week, and tries to find time to see his wife and kids once in a while?”
“Good. Because I need you to come to a meeting with my assailant, the porn queen.”
He lets a big sigh gust past those refrigerator-white teeth of his.
“You’ll enjoy it,” I say. “I’m hoping she’ll bring your pal Cogswell.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Early next morning, I log into Facebook to discover that Kate Dreyfus, who went to Beverly with Boom-Boom Laphroig, wants to friend me at Melody’s suggestion. I accept then check my chat icon, but she’s not online.
I check her profile and find some comments from a group composed of her high school graduating class. I click through to the group, and there’s her senior class picture. Boom-Boom is big and black and hard to miss. I hover my cursor over her image and get lucky. Someone has tagged it with her real name. Josephine Barbeaux Laphroig. Looks like French-Scottish roots. I wonder if “Boom-Boom” came from Barbeaux.
I Google Josephine Laphroig and get a hit on a parenting blog. A young mother wrote gushingly about her five-year-old daughter being cured of an embarrassing stutter by a fabulous speech pathologist named Josephine B. Laphroig. I check the California Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology Board’s website to verify her license and find that she’s still in LA. She practices in the mid-Wilshire district. I call 411, and a robot gives me her office number. I’ve barely finished my first cup of coffee, and I’ve already accomplished something. The day is starting off well.
A little before nine, Angel‘s azure Jag XK rolls to a stop in front of the shredded sofa. He’s wearing a natty navy-blue suit with shiny brass buttons.
“Who fragged the couch?” he asks.
“Runt.” I realize I still have to call Sanitation to pick it up. I don’t know how that keeps slipping my mind. “You ready for your law school reunion?”
“She’s bringing a lawyer. That’s doesn’t mean it’ll be Cogswell.”
“We’re going to hammer out a deal to lie to the DA. You really think she wants a legitimate lawyer involved?”
“I’ll pretend you didn’t say that.”
There’s surprisingly little traffic on the Ventura Freeway heading out to Chatsworth, so we’re running early. We stop off at Brent’s Deli for coffee. We grab an isolated table in the back. It’s not until we’re seated that I notice his brass buttons are embossed with little sea anchors. Uncharacteristically cheesy.
Our waitress looks like Dolly Parton might if she’d never had plastic surgery. Angel and I both order coffee and a side of rye toast. He’s already eaten, and I’m not much for breakfast.
“So what’s your game plan?” he asks.
“I’ll figure that out when the ball’s in play. I just want to get some face time with Cogswell. He’s a hard guy to pin down.”
“I’d be very careful about pulling his
chain, or you might find it around your neck.”
I know I should heed the warning, since Angel knows Cogswell well enough to know what he’s capable of. But sometimes inquiring minds want to know a little too badly for their own good.
“I’ll tread softly. His little invasion of my house has me on edge.”
“You don’t have any proof that he’s the one who searched your house.” Ever the lawyer.
“He’s the only one who’s got professional break-in artists on the payroll.”
“Nathaniel Strain hires roughneck welders, and Billy Strain’s got drug connections. Either of them could have easily found a rent-a-thief.”
“Well, neither of them is going to be at this meeting, so let’s focus on Cogswell, shall we?”
“This is not about Cogswell, it’s about Jane Porter. This is not about your article, this is about keeping you out of court and potentially out of jail.”
I nod to acknowledge my acquiescence, but we both know I don’t mean it.
“Jane’s obviously nervous about making a deal with you,” he continues. “That’s why she wants a lawyer there. I’m sure she doesn’t want any media attention—-it’s bad for business—and there’s a chance she could face charges if the DA doesn’t think the assault was justified. On the other hand, she doesn’t want to do anything illegal that may give you some sort of blackmail power. She’s got to make sure you can’t finger her for anything without going down yourself.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know.”
“The capital of South Dakota is Pierre.”
“I knew that.”
“Did you know that it’s the only mainland US state capital not located on or near an interstate highway?”
“You got me there.”
At ten o’clock, Uncle Manny leads us to Jane’s new office in the Chatsworth studio. In the anteroom, Jane’s assistant, Robert, is watering the enormous potted fern that dominated the old office. He pops to attention as we walk in, dripping water on the new carpet, but he doesn’t notice. He’s wearing a black-and-white sweater-vest and black chinos today. Must be casual Friday at Fun with Dick and Jane, but Robert seems tense, the kind of tense you get when your boss is on edge. He eyeballs Angel like he’s never seen a black man before.